A while back, we wrote about the growing benefits of HTML5 as a development standard. Now, the announcement from Google, Bing and Yahoo about their support of new datatypes brings us to the impact of the new standards on organic search.

These changes will improve the usefulness of page content by enabling creators to precisely identify attributes of many types of content, which should produce more precise definitions for users right in the search results. That will make your information a better match to what searchers have in mind, and thus increase the percentage of users who click on the landing page – and stay there to answer your call to action. However, incorporating the new datatypes will require changes to page markup, and somebody has to do it.

If you haven’t got time or staff to take advantage of these improvements, don’t despair. Your SEO agency can help. If you haven’t worked with outside specialists, now might be a good time to consider the value – especially if you’ve got a lot of content to review for the changes.

Incorporating the new datatypes most effectively will be a major project for many firms. In order to achieve the best results, this should be approached methodically. There is no need to rush. The new datatypes are not fully supported yet by the engines; adoption will be done in stages. And as with so much else involving SEO, results will not be immediate, but will show up over a bit of time.

So, we suggest a plan. Start with a portion of content, evaluated to yield the maximum results with least effort. Identify and rank all the other content. Assign the data attributes to be used. Make the changes. Track the results. Modify if necessary.

I’ll explain a sample project in more detail in my next post. Meanwhile, you can read Google’s assessment of the new datatypes and overall schema on their webmaster pages.